Getting Started with Web Accessibility

For the past few years, the web industry is changing rapidly: we have new tools, frameworks, and libraries that allow us to create rich and inventive user interfaces.
Since 1997 the World Wide Consortium (W3C) has introduced the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and ever since we have a powerful toolset and lots of resources that help us build a more accessible Web.
Our work affects more than people than you may think, more than 500 million web users worldwide are suffering some kind of disability. In this post, I'll cover a few resources and basic tooling getting started with accessibility.

Case studies.

Convincing your employers, colleagues or even yourself that accessibility really matters can be harsh or even frustrating. Besides the humanitarian perspective, accessible user interfaces can boost the revenue and visitors for your products or systems.

W3C has also a knowledge base with some case studies from major companies and organizations.

Getting actually started

As always breaking a monolith at once is inefficient and requires lots of planning and effort.
You can start right away though, tweaking a few parts or pieces of your product can significantly change the experience for your users.

Final thoughts

Getting started with web accessibility is likely a mindset and requires changing your development and designing habits rather than tearing apart and refactoring your entire codebase.
In the upcoming tutorials and posts, I will cover more technical details about setting up a development environment and automate the transition to a more accessible codebase.